Talk:Palus (tribe)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is part of WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America, which collaborates on Native American, First Nations, and related subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start	This article has been rated as start-Class on the assessment scale.
Suggested article edit guidelines: To help us prioritise our workload, and in readiness for Wikipedia:1.0, we need to assess our articles for Quality. If this article is Unassessed, please assess it. See the Article Classification for instructions. If you disagree with a rating, you can change it or discuss it at Article Classification. Before assessing this article, be sure to check the existing Archive of assessments made under the previous system (used until July 2006), and feel free to help in migrating the existing comments besides from adding your own evaluation. After assessing this article's quality, please make sure it to add it to the Lists at Article Classification, following the grading scheme detailed there.
This article has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it needs.

[edit] Is Palus a Sahaptian word, or of French origin?

The usual etymology for Palouse is that it's from la pelouse, meaning a grassland in French, this being the language of the bulk of the HBC and NWC employees who were the first European-connected outsiders to traverse the region (I use European connected because many HBC employees, though speaking French as a lingua franca within the company, were of aboriginal origin from the Prairies and beyond). Is "Palus" just a "nativized" version of Palouse, or is there an actual Sahaptian etymology here. If so, could someone also explain how it is that the French term for grassland is so darned close, and why it is that English (and French) speakers adopted the Palus name for this region? It should be noted that the Cayuse, Nez Perce, Pend d'Oreille and many other tribes in the area were not known by their native names (in fact, the Cayuse name for the Cayuse people and language is AFAIK completely forgotten); likewise the Nootka, Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Shuswap, Kootenai and more (here given in their English names). So how was it that a native word for a native people became translated to a stretch of landscape? Or is it, as not said clearly in the opening paragraph, that Palouse is another form of the same word, and originally meant the prairie area around these parts, and then became applied to the people who lived there?Skookum1 09:52, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

• One other explanation is that it is a Sahaptian word meaning something sticking down in the water[1]. The term is also mentioned in the journals of Lewis and Clark. One source for information is "Plateau: Key to Tribal Territories" in Handbook of North American Indians. V.12: Plateau Edited by Deward W. Walker, Jr. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1998. Pages 352-359 deal with the tribe. I will look it up today at work and see if I can find more. Another (semi)interesting word is Appaloosa, said to derive from the white settlers in the region calling them Palus horses. Robbie Giles 14:12, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Now that makes sense to me - "It's a Palousa" (with the -a provided by some American dialect trait).Skookum1 19:25, 28 December 2006 (UTC)